The fact is certainly not lost on Dr Clare Jackson, presenter of a new three-part series The Stuarts (BBC Two), about the royal dynasty. Her focus was almost entirely on King James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 also became King James I of England and duly paved the way for the Act of Union between the two nations a century later.

Assuming the English throne from an heirless Elizabeth I, he insisted that, more than a geographical entity, Britain should become a socio-political one too. We followed James toying with different designs for the flag that would eventually become the Union Jack, and asserting divine right for his one-island-one-country policy to doubting MPs at Westminster: “What God has joined together, let no man split apart.”

Jackson presented James as a man ahead of his time – not just in his ideas, but in his canny campaigning, which anticipated politicians in today’s Referendum debate. Her history came with one eye on the past and the other firmly on the present. Which, in a way, of course, is fine. Many 17th-century questions about the Union are as relevant now as ever.

The trouble was that Jackson left so many other areas of Stuart history unexplored. Their Breton origins, for instance; their self-proclaimed descent from the real-life Banquo; not to mention, all the dynasty’s Kings of Scotland before James, who from 1371 ran a court of bloody, vengeful treachery.

Proceeding chronologically from 1603, Jackson gives us none of this. The closest thing we got to intrigue was the sudden death of James’s eldest son and heir, Henry, from what some suspected was poisoning – though it actually turned out to be typhoid.

I suppose that things may pick up later in the series, as we still (hopefully) have Charles I’s beheading, the Civil War, Great Plague, Charles II’s libertinism and Bonnie Prince Charlie to come. But my hopes aren’t high.

Jackson is a measured, assured presenter, and I understand her wish to show her period of history to be the one that defined modern Britain. But here she did so at the expense of any attempt to engage with the romance that keeps the Stuarts alive in the popular imagination today: without a hint of tartan or Walter Scott. This seems a myopic approach to a dynasty best seen in the panoramic.